Now one of the most important video artists in China, Wang Gongxin was largely an outsider in relation to the country’s avant-garde movement in the mid-1980s. As an outstanding student in Soviet realism–style oil painting, in 1987 he was sent to New Yorka space-time drastically different from China, culturally and aesthetically, and already deep in postmodernismto further his art studies. At first shocked by the art practices on the other side of the earth, Wang slowly shifted his painting to a more minimal and conceptual mode in the late 1980s. In 1993, he combined his new works